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Nerval's Lobster writes "Twitter has rolled out Vine, a free app for iOS devices that allows users to shoot and post short videos. Twitter's strategic focus on brevity—the company has long resisted calls to lengthen Tweets beyond the current 140-character limit—extends to Vine videos, which can only be six seconds in length. 'Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger,' Dom Hoffman, Vine's co-founder and general manager, wrote in a blog posting. 'They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.' It's easy to see the Vine acquisition as part of Twitter's larger push into multimedia. The company launched a muscled-up photo service Dec. 10, complete with Instagram-style filters and editing tools. That photo launch came on the heels of an escalating battle with Instagram, the Facebook subsidiary, which decided to disable photo integration with Twitter; that same month, Yahoo also decided to jump into the fray with a new Flickr app for iPhone, complete with special filters and the ability to post images to various social networks."

On Twitter I can actually interact with celebrities directly, on Facebook I can consume what their handlers put online. Huge difference. Twitter is like IRC for the world, dive in, read and chat, go about your day. - HEX

As for the video service, it's probably going to fail pretty hard. People can get used to posting within a word limit, but most idiots with a cell phone take a good 10 seconds just to get the camera pointed at what they're trying to film. Just look at youtube for examples, 6 seconds is far too short... they'll need at least 30 seconds to a full minute to make it work.

I support a short limit for EXACTLY that reason. Twitter taught people to be brief. While you CAN tweet a long thought in 5 rapid fire tweets it's not worth the effort usually. So you just shorten and let it go. YouTube is an example of why we need to give limits. I mean people post 15 minute clips of something that took less than 7 to say. I still think YouTube should institute a policy of making people watch their own videos before posting them. Even if it's just for the lowest ranked videos or something.

Some of us don't just use Twitter to stalk celebrities. I personally use it for political commentary, getting blog hits (I don't run ads, so no, not for revenue), & getting news before news websites get it.

It's probably the most powerful medium for journalists & bloggers.

That being said, I don't see Vine as adding anything to Twitter, nor do I see it being taken up in a hurry. I'll give it a go, but I don't think I'll rush out & "Vine" everything I see.

Interesting that people are assuming that I'm only using it to stalk celebrities; most of my use is free form discussion, latest news, and of course talking with other creative folks both famous and not so famous.
Not directed at you some of the ACs: Twitter isn't supposed to be continuously read, of course no one is going to read all the tweets that mention them, and people shouldn't be trying to read every tweet by their favorite celebrities. You look at the stream as it goes by, you don't obsess over it

I use twitter like ICQ. it's a way to converse with my community asynchronously. That's my active purpose with twitter. I talk to fellow CAGs. Passively yeah I get urgent news from twitter and general news from "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me"

You folks are thinking of the wrong celebrities, I'm talking about the real people like Kevin Smith (@thatKevinSmith), Bruce Campbell (@GroovyBruce), William Shatner (@WilliamShatner), Warren Ellis (@warrenellis), and many more who tweet and respond themselves. I guess I just don't follow the kind of people who don't do their own Twitter. - HEX

Just because they respond to some tweets personally doesn't mean they even see most of them. I doubt Smith, Campbell, etc. get all that many Tweets, but someone like Shatner would spend every waking moment reading Twitter if he didn't use an intern or some kind of automatic filter to sort them.I've heard a lot of Celebs mention in interviews that they don't really "read" their Twitter, they just kind of scan the pages of posts every so often and sometimes one post "jumps out" at them and they might respond.

If you're chatting up people who are, or are who purport to be, teenage girls, and those teenage girls couldn't fairly, decently or naturally be referred to by others as YOUR peers, then I'm glad the desk sergeant is doing his job.

Also, I read it wrong at first - I actually warmed to the idea of being chatted up online by a Sarge, then I read it again and got the context correct from the bust bit...

What do you mean "interact". Tweeting at a person you don't know is the equivalent of saying (or maybe yelling) something at them as they walk by in a public place. Celebs don't really do the public interactions very well as it is, so why would they interact with something that is far easier to ignore / delete?

with thousands of people talking to them, you're lucky if they notice what you say.

Has it ever crossed your mind that you could just get a life, instead? WTF does a celebrity have to say that could possibly interest me? I visit Sodahead occasionally. A vast majority of the posts/surveys are mindless drivel about people that I simply don't give a damn about. If a catastrophe took them all out tomorrow, I'd never miss any of them. The headline would catch my eye, and I'd go "Awww, that's a shame." Ten minutes later, I'd for

How do you know that? A good manager is indistinguishable from the real thing, except for never saying anything offensive, legally dubious, or that could be seen as endorsing a product. Something no sensible celebrity would do. The only way I can imagine to know with any degree of reliability that a celebrity account is real and not filtered by their PR agent would be if they said something so monumentally stupid that no PR agency could possibly allow it - and I'm talking 'Blame the jews for ruining the eco

Indeed. ^H is a shortened form of Ctrl-H (C-H for those Emacs lovers). Since H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, it corresponds to ASCII character code 0x08: the backspace (BS) control code. A horizontal tab was code 0x09, so when you press the tab key or use the "\t" escape in strings in a programming language, you're actually sending that control code. Of course, that's mostly ancient history now for most. Keyboard manufacturers, Assembly programmers and hardware driver creators come to mind as the few who might actually need to know such information...

Short version: In certain circumstances, rarely encountered on modern operating systems but once frustratingly common, pressing backspace would not be recognised and instead give you a ^H symbol. Worse, under very specific circumstances the backspace might be recognised by the OS (erasing a character on screen) but passed as ^H to the application - from the user's perspective, all works, but really their typoes and erased sentences are getting recorded as part of whatever document they are writing.

I have encountered it myself only once, when connected via serial terminal with the wrong termtype set. Back when serial terminals were common this was a very easy mistake to make, but serial terminals today are confined only to hardware configuration ports and occasionally access-of-last-resort on servers.

It's OK to ask (although you probably could have looked it up) and I understand that younger people might not know this, but it's pretty sad to me that his has been modded up. I think it says something about the way the userbase of slashdot has changed.

I was mainly asking because it's odd to me in this context. I assume that he's backspacing over the F word? I had never seen a/.er do this before...
And, my comment got modded up funny, not informative/interesting/etc. So the mod just thought I was a stupid n00bl3t -- which I am this time!

Back in the early to mid 90's, when I was in undergrad and using several different unix platforms (AIX, HP-UX, SunOS, Linux, DEC-OS, dumb X-terminals, etc.), different programs on different platforms treated backspace as different things. The talk/ntalk/ytalk command on HP-UX was especially annoying. It would interpret the backspace key as a ^C and kill your talk connection to your buddy across the country using his unix account to chat with you. Imagine typing away, then hitting the backspace key to fi

I've never understood the appeal in Twitter or this hype about abbreviated messages, videos, etc.

I mean, 140 characters made sense in an era before widespread smartphones, where the average person only had a phone capable of receiving SMSes and carriers often charged per message.

But its 2013, we've got faster internet connections via mobile networks than what most of us used to have back home ten years ago. With all this added bandwidth you think we'd be overcoming limitations, not adding in more.

How much time do you have to read a bunch of random posts by your friends/celebrities/companies? Most people have a lot of things competing for their attention, personally and professionally. If the posts are limited in size so you can very quickly scan them all, you're more likely to read them. And the authors of the posts are more likely to make every byte count. Instead of rambling on, they're more likely to reconsider what they actually need to say to get their point across. They distill their messages.

Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what. There's very little meaningful information that can be conveyed via video in 6 seconds.

I can say "Fuck You!" 14 times in six seconds. That should be enough to get my point across.

Ah, but you could say it 17.5 times textually in a tweet, which is far more efficient. Oddly enough, I still don't get your point. Repeating yourself does not make it clearer. Are you upset at the poster, Twitter, Vine, or yourself?

Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what.

That's just people thinking they're outsmarting the system by working around it because they're not smart enough to realize why the limit is there. And you're free to decide their shortened URL isn't worth following. I ignore all tweets that contain a shortened URL if they don't adequately describe what they're sending me to. And I ignore all Twitterers (Twitterheads?) who use shortened URLs in every other tweet. People who post or read that stuff deserve what they get -- it's like watching (or appearing on

Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what. There's very little meaningful information that can be conveyed via video in 6 seconds.

In 140 characters you can learn whether or not you want to follow the link. (Or the tweeter.) It's brilliant.

Not sure what 6 seconds of video can do, but I'm interested in finding out.

Simple: Twitter has to pay for SMS gateway access to receive tweets from people's phones. They get special bulk rates which would have to be adjusted higher to compensate for the extra bandwidth if they accepted multi-part SMS traffic. To get the cheapest rate they keep the limit to the max length of a single SMS message.

Even in this era of widespread smartphones with high speed cellular data and WiFi connectivity, the SMS functionality is implemented as a kludge on top of the old voice protocol. That imple

It's a two-way thing, you keep your message short and people will read it. Moreover, people will read them even if you post a lot of messages.

Think of it this way, as a reader: you may have noticed that most blogging services like LiveJournal initially provided a feed that showed every single post, in full, that had been posted by the people you follow (obviously paged, and obviously in date order.) While I rather liked that, it started to get unwieldy when you started to follow a lot of people, and star

The limited size of messages ensures that they will be devoid of any useful content.Most of them are "Look! a squirrel!" type messages and can be ignored. They do fit well with the attention span of many people.I think the problem is that the bandwidth of people has shrunk to Twitter size.

I wonder, is the vine format smaller than gif? Lots of small gifs all around, so no reason they couldnt be placed if devices can view them.Only problem I can think of, I want to be able to see them on my android phone and laptop and no viewer yet?

Not sure what all the hate is, its like people dont like new tech around here.